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Craft beverages by the numbers
This blog post is from The Post Star "Business Connection" Blog, written by Scott Donnelly
I had a chance on Friday to visit with Aaron MacLeod, director of Hartwick College’s Center for Craft Food and Beverage in Oneonta.A friend of mine who’s trying to start a brewery downstate set up the meeting, at which MacLeod schooled a bunch of longtime homebrewers in the ways of brewing science.
Well, just the basics; we only had a couple of hours of his time.
But the visit was enlightening, including an analysis of several bottles of our very own homebrew.
It’s easy to see how the center’s services – there’s a fee schedule on the website link above – could be useful to anyone interested in honing their brewing skills.
But it may prove critical to craft brewers hoping to fine tune their processes in order to ensure quality or compliance with labeling laws. For anyone who’s ever wondered whether their pre-brew calculations about alcohol content, IBUs or SRM are accurate, a scientific analysis of the finished product can be a real confidence booster.
Of course, science can go the other way, as well.
